Mark 9

Chapter 9. The Intertwined MiraclesWhen she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” (Mark 5:27-28)“Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher any more?“Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” (Mark 5:35-36)The two miracles suggested by these two texts bear a relation to each other unlike any others in the Gospels. They are so intertwined in each other as to form one story. Before the woman touched Him, He was already on His way to answer the summons of the ruler of the synagogue, whose daughter was lying at the point of death, so that wondrous miracle of resurrection power may be said to have already begun. But right in the midst of it came the other incident of the healing of the woman with the spirit of infirmity who pressed through the crowd and touched the border of His garment. Then when that was finished and the woman sent on her way rejoicing, He continued His journey to the house of Jairus and ended the stupendous program by raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead. There must be some special lesson in this interlinking of these two incidents, conveying some message to us believers and Christian workers that we ought not to miss. Let us approach this lesson through the many incidental teachings of the story. An Emergency Call The first thing we note is the extreme emergency of this first case. Returning from Decapolis the Master found a great concourse of people awaiting His little boat. In front of the crowd came a distinguished man for whom the multitude made way with every token of respect. It was the ruler of the synagogue, Jairus, who immediately threw himself at the feet of Jesus in humble prostration, “and pleaded earnestly with him, ‘My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live’” (Mark 5:23). No case was ever too hard for the Lord, and so He immediately responded and went along with the distressed father with a vast throng of people surging about them on every side. Let us bring our hard cases to the Lord Jesus. Let us hear Him saying in the face of the gravest dangers, “Don’t be afraid; just believe” (Mark 5:36). The Master at Leisure One would have thought that, facing such an emergency, nothing would have been allowed to detain Him for a moment. It must have been a fearful trial for the agonized father when the interruption came and the Lord turned around to talk to the woman that had pressed through the concourse to touch His garment. But God is never in a hurry, and the Lord Jesus was always deliberate and had leisure. When the tidings came a little later that Lazarus was sick, we are specially told, “When he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days” (John 11:6). “He that believeth shall not make haste” (Isaiah 28:16). Faith is always at rest. If God is in charge, nothing can get beyond Him. His eyes run to and fro throughout the whole earth and no other can anticipate or stay His hand from working. How wonderful it is for us to realize that every moment matters of emergency are pressing upon the attention of our ascended Lord! Every instant He is intensely occupied with the government of the universe and the care of His people. This very hour thousands of His people are calling upon Him from all parts of the world; some are dying; some are pleading for dying friends; some are in instant peril; some are pleading for His mercy and salvation. He is the greatest of all workers and the most occupied of all strenuous lives, and yet He is at leisure to listen to your feeblest whisper or your longest appeal, to enter into every detail of your situation and to go with you through every minute stepping of your perplexing way. Was there ever such a heart of love and such a wise and resourceful mind? Nothing takes Him by surprise. Danger and death have for Him no alarms. Oh, let us come to Him with confidence and ever live in touch with His guiding eye and upholding hand. The family of Jairus thought no doubt that that delay had been fatal to their interests, and they sent an urgent message saying to the father, “Your daughter is dead,… why bother the teacher any more?” (Mark 5:35). It was a very polite and courteous way of saying, “You have come too late. You have waited too long; it is all over.” But the Lord paid no attention to this message. No doubt He saw in the father’s face the same despair, but He only reassured him and bade him fear not, but only believe. Our times are in His hands as well as our lives and interests. In the parable of Luke 11, it was when the door was shut and the night was far gone that the friend in need came to the gates of prayer and found that the extremity of the case did not hinder his guest but only brought out in clearer light the grace and power of the heavenly Friend. It is never too late to call upon God or knock at the doors of almighty grace. The Touch of Power Undoubtedly the overshadowing lesson of the story is the almighty power of the Lord Jesus over death. Hitherto He had appeared as the conqueror of sin, Satan and disease and the elements of nature. But now a new enemy confronts Him. It is that grim and resistless foe that well has been called the king of terrors. How little he cares for human helplessness and sorrow is evident in this pathetic picture. It was a little girl that had been gasping out her life in yonder home and now lay cold and still in death. Oh, how the picture recalls some other little girl that we have seen lying cold and silent in her coffin, and received perhaps, as some of us did, our first dreadful impression of the power of death, the mysterious power! How love had clung to her and prayer had pleaded for her; but all in vain. The ruthless destroyer had trampled her beauty and her youth into the dust, and she was dead and in a little while must be given up to the cold and silent grave. No one knew as well as He the dreadful significance of death. He had seen its ravages through all the ages since first the sentence fell at the gates of Eden. “For dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). A little later we see Him looking into a tomb at Bethany and the awful spectacle, as it brings up before Him the vision of all who ever died and ever shall go down to the realms of death. It broke His heart, and we read that Jesus groaned in spirit and was troubled, and a little later, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). It was to face this grim foe that He came. His mission was to “destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery” (Hebrews 2:14). And now at last He was face to face with death and was about to be manifested as its master and destroyer. “Your daughter is dead” (Mark 5:35), they tell Jairus. Does He turn back or blanch before that prospect? No! He only answers, “Don’t be afraid, just believe” (Mark 5:36). Calmly dismissing the multitude and taking with Him three chosen companions, Peter, James and John, He enters the home of death. There is a motley crowd of Eastern mourners, and already the dramatic scene of Oriental lamentation has begun. He meets it with strange rebuke, and then adds a mysterious word whose depths of meaning no one of us perhaps has ever yet measured, and which only filled His hearers with amusement and scorn, “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep” (Mark 5:39). Did He know something about the disembodied spirit and the thing that we call death, which we have yet to learn? Something of what He meant we know regarding those who sleep in Jesus, and we thank our blessed Lord that that sweet word has taken away half the dread of death. No wonder they laughed Him to scorn, but He as little regarded their wild professional demonstrations of grief. It was a hollow show of this cheap world which is just as silly in its fashions of sorrow as in its entertainments of pleasure and joyfulness. But putting them all out, He took the father and the mother and His three disciples and calmly entered into the chamber of death, and without any incantations or outward show, “He took her by the hand and said to her,” Talitha Koum!’… ‘Little girl, I say to you, get up!’” (Mark 5:41). The simplicity and modesty of the narrative moves with a majesty that no theatrical figures of speech could add to, and we stand awed and overwhelmed with them before the advent of One who at length “has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10). “Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished…. and [He] told them to give her something to eat” (Mark 5:42, Mark 5:43). This was Christ’s first victory over the power of death. It was the pledge and guarantee of all that followed afterwards and that was still to come. Henceforth He holds the keys of Hades and of death. His own death was necessary for the final expulsion of the king of terrors; but that has been accomplished, and now to the believer death is but a shadow and a sleep, “a tunnel,” as someone has said, “carrying us beneath the waters of the dark river to the glorious city of the New Jerusalem.” In a little while even the form of death shall be swallowed up in life. This was the supreme proof of Christ’s Messiahship. He had vindicated His claim to be the Son of God and the Savior of the world from all the issues of the fall. But the one special lesson which we desire to emphasize, in connection with this part of the chapter, is the divine side of God’s grace and power. Here we have a case where there was nothing that man could do. That helpless child could not put forth a single effort, nor move a muscle to approach Him. The leper could kneel at his feet, the paralytic could take up his bed and walk, the woman could press through the crowd and touch Him with her hand; but the little girl could do nothing but lie in helplessness, the passive subject of creating power. And so there is a point of view from which the whole work of salvation is divine. This is the standpoint of the Calvinist. To him man is helpless and God almighty. The sovereignty of the Lord is everything here, and we are saved through His effectual calling and almighty grace. This is all true and to the latest ages of eternity it will be our humble and joyful cry, “By the grace of God I am what I am…. not I, but the grace of God that was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). The Touch of Faith But there is another side to this great philosophy of redemption. There is a human side as well as a divine. There is a touch of faith as well as a touch of God. Therefore it comes to pass that the story of the woman who reached out her hand and drew from Him, by a force within herself, His life and power is interwoven with the other story of the child whom Jesus touched without any cooperation from her will or her helpless hand. This is the other side of the great dual problem, divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Both are true and each in its place is imperative. We must trust as if all depended upon God and we must work as if all depended on us. In a sense the Lord appeared to be at first involuntary in His response to this woman’s faith. The healing virtue passed from His person without a distinct act of will on His part and in response to a touch on her part which had in it some strange power to appropriate His very life. Surely we are taught by this striking illustration that the blessings which God has to impart to us through the Lord Jesus Christ do not wait upon some sovereign act of His will, but are already granted, completed and prepared and simply awaiting the contact of a believing hand to open all the channels of communication. It is like the electric current which is already communicating with your home, and which you have only to turn on by touching the switch which connects the wires; or like the sunlight of heaven which is already pouring all around you and which you have but to open your window to let in. What a responsibility this places upon us! All things are ready and we have but to come and take of the water of life freely. This applies not only to the primary question of salvation, but to all the successive steps of Christian experience. But we must not fail to notice that the touch of faith is a very personal one. It involves not only our hand but His personality. Faith must recognize the Lord Jesus Himself and come into immediate contact with Him before it can draw His healing virtue or His comforting love. We have already seen in the previous chapter how much more was involved in this touch than her immediate healing. Her initial act of faith had to be followed by a frank and full confession. When a soul comes into living touch with the Lord Jesus, it is introduced to a new world of infinite and endless blessing. “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).